Hi Dave: see responses below. John Coyle Brisbane, Australia
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave Kennedy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "PDML" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2002 12:26 AM Subject: Slide management > As my slide collection grows, I'm learning that chronological storage > in slide trays may not be the best solution for finding slides I'm > looking for quickly. > > So. A couple of questions. > > 1) What do you use as a storage medium for your slides? Slide trays? > Metal boxes? Plastic sheets? Other? A mix I'm afraid. I started buying slide storage boxes, and getting others to get them for me, and wound up with a mix of wooden and plastic of all sorts of shapes and capacities. it seems no-one continues to make the same design for very long! That was when I had all my slides returned mounted: now I get them cut and sleeved, and so I keep the unmounted frames in plastic sheets (archival quality, of course). Many of the less interesting ones are in the original boxes in which they were returned. > > 2) Do you have a specific numbering/labeling system? How does it work? > I was trying to do a yyyyrrrff (YearRollFrame) numbering system, but > I'd like to hear about what you use. > I use a subject classification system, in the form AANNN-NN, and store the slides accordingly. I quickly found it easier to find something by subject than try to remember when I might have taken it. > 3) Software. Do you use any slide specific s/w? Something that would > allow a numbering system, and category, and print labels? I was using a > Thinkdb Tinybyte on my Palm for tracking this, but this is not the > easiest way to enter lots of data either. > I use my own program, written in the last couple of years, which allows me to track and find any frame or group of frames, whether digitised or not, by a number of references (keyword, subject, unique reference, camera, lens or film used, location, date etc.) The system will automatically create records in a searchable database from digitised images, or allow direct data entry, or loading from an existing text file. > 4) Anything else > Keep in mind that this is strickly hobby level, so I'm not going to be > tracking 1000s of slides/year with this, nor am I able to spend > hundreds of dollars to do this. > It's a lot easier if you do it a film at a time - I spent yesterday cataloguing about 40 sheets of negatives from 1998!